"Mysteries Of Winterthurn" by Joyce Carol Oates, Some Responses to Reading It!

In the past, I have read and written on this blog about at least one of Joyce Carol Oates' books, "Where Is Here" which is a collection of short stories which I liked a lot. I have also read some of her short stories which have been published independently elsewhere. I have to say that this book, "Mysteries Of Winterthurn" which is generally described as a novel is an interesting book. There are parts of it which I like a lot. There are other parts of it which fail to impress me. First and foremost, I would not say flatly that I see it as a novel. I think of it much more as a Short Story Cycle which is generally described as a collection of short stories with several common aspects including common characters, common setting, a rational timeline which is evident across all the stories, and in most short story cycles all the stories are viable if viewed as being independent of the others. The book is composed of three stories which are also arguably novellas ranging in length from 150 pages to almost 200. The stories have a common protagonist, Xavier Kilgarvan, who is a young man of about 20 or so years in the first story and a man of nearly retirement age in the third. The stories progress across his lifespan in a rational timeline, but there is a sizeable gap of time between each subsequent story and the next. All three are set in Winterthurn a rural,small town in New England. All the stories share a common cast of lesser characters. Each story involves murders which Xavier works to solve since all are unsolved at the time of his initial involvement. The writing style in these stories is very different from the style in the short story collection which I mentioned above. That writing style is reminescent of the work of Edgar Allan Poe or other major writers of early American mystery or detective stories. I believe that Oates set herself the task of emulating as closely as possible the writing style which is generally seen in early American murder mysteries or the English examples such as the work of Conan Doyle. The language is cumbersome, verbose, and replete with words and terms which have nearly fallen out of use in spoken English in America today. I commend Joyce Carol Oates on that effort to emulate the earlier style of writing. She did an excellent job of making the book appear to almost be a 19th century work in the genre. But it is a cumbersome read in today's world. I have to admit that as I read the book I was unmotivated to read it straight through from beginning to end. I had to take a break between the stories, read other works by other authors which were written in more modern styles. After reading another book following each of the stories, I was able to motivate myself to return and complete the book. I have to admit that I rarely, if ever, begin a book which I do not finish reading. I firmly believe that if I begin a book I owe the author an obligation to complete it. That author has spenta sizeable chunk of their time writing the book,obtaining a publishing contract, and marketing the book with public appearances, book signings, and other promotionial work such as radio and television interviews. If you are a devoted reader of murder mysteries, you might love this book. If you are not such a reader, you might stop long before you reach the end.

"The Unvanquished" by William Faulkner, A Wonderful Novel of The Civil War And Reconstruction!

"The Unvanquished" by William Faulkner was originally published in 1934 and has been a staple of many college classes in Southern Literature, Civil War Literature, and general American Literature ever since. It is one of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County novels and features several key figures in the saga of his mythical county: John Sartoris, John Sartoris Jr., Ab Snopes, and others. The novel covers both the period of the Civil War and of early Reconstruction. The protagonist is John Sartoris, Jr. who is about 12 years old when the novel begins and a full grown adult at the end. His slave Ringo is also a major figure in the novel. The two are just a few months different in age and literally grew up together much like brothers, but clearly also a slave owner and a slave. Their relationship is a major key to everything in the novel. They are inseparable, literally bound at the hip. That relationship, as Faulkner portrays it, is both an indictment and an apologia for the entire slave holding culture of the south. The two work together to attempt to murder the first Union officer they ever see using a musket which resides on most occasions over the mantel in the main room of the Sartoris mansion. They are still together at the end of the novel as young Sartoris goes to confront his father's former business partner and killer. The novel is the basis of a strong argument about the much vaunted code of honor of southern gentlemen, and parts of it are said to have been a fictional portrayal of some events which took place in the life of an actual Faulkner ancestor. The individual chapters of the novel, seven in all, were originally published as short stories and the book is sometimes drawn into the perpetual argument among students of literature about just where a collection of short stories with common characters ends and a novel begins. In my opinion, it is a novel and that argument should have been ceased many years ago. For an example of a collection of such short stories with common characters fails to fulfill the requirements of a novel I suggest that you read "The Hawk's Done Gone" by Mildred Haun which is a fine book but not quite a novel. You could never find two better books to read in order to fully comprehend that argument, and to help put an end to it also. As the book progresses, John Sartoris, Jr. and Ringo progress from being two boys playing war in the dust near the slave quarters to become two young southern men, both black and white, who have survived both childhood and the Civil War to become very typical white slave holding and black slave men who are still, at least in their own eyes, brothers. John Sartoris, Sr. looms over the entire novel as a larger than life Colonel in the Confederate Army and as the head of the Sartoris family although he is not present on the plantation most of the time as the novel progresses. He is both a patriarch and a symbol of the failed Confederate effort. He is a role model for his son in the most traditional of senses, and is the axis on which much of the novel moves. His mother-in-law, Granny is a major character of the novel, maintains order at home while the elder Sartoris is off at war, and is dearly beloved by her grandson, the Sartoris slaves, and most of their neighbors. She concocts a plot to use a letter signed by the commanding Union officer in the area to confiscate over two hundred head of mules, disburse them to the poor, both black and white, in the area of the plantation, and is eventually caught in the scheme along with her grandson and Ringo. Ringo is both the brains of much of the operation and a loyal servant and man Friday to his young master and companion. Drusilla, a young female distant cousin of the elder Sartoris is a young woman who loses her fiancee to the Union forces and seeks to avenge his death by utilizing her talents with both guns and horses to assist the elder Sartoris and his troops in their doomed war. Her mother uses the old southern mores about what "good women" are supposed to do and be in order to force her to marry the elder Sartoris because she has spent many weeks riding, fighting, and hiding in the woods with him and his troops as a young single woman. This is a powerful novel of the Civil War and Reconstruction by a man who lived his life in the shadow of his own ancestors who had fought and lost in the effort. It addresses multiple issues which have arisen for several hundred years in the south: slavery, male and female relationships, rich versus poor whites, Union versus Confederate, young southerners living in the oversized shadows of their elders, and the dominant question since Lee surrendered, "just how do southerners go on living after the war?"

"Nowhere Else On Earth" by Josephine Humphreys, One Helluva Novel!

This is a tremendous novel! This is one of the best novels I have ever read! This is, by far, the best novel I have read since I read "Wilderness" by Robert Penn Warren. I haven't had enough time to read everything I have ever wanted to or should have read. But it still amazes me that I never heard of Josephine Humphreys until I blundered into this novel by accident. The novel is a story of the late Civil War and Reconstruction just as is "Wilderness" and a couple of other things I have read and written about on this blog lately. But I have not set out on any conscious effort to read a lot of novels about the Civil War. It just happens by accident when I am not deliberately reading for a research based purpose. But I have never been more pleased to find a great writer by accident. Humphreys novel is a masterpiece of southern literature. Her plot work is astounding in this book. Her character development is tremendously detailed, written into the flow of the novel with purpose and without visible intent. It just happens which is what great writers do when they are writing at their best. The novel is set in the late years of the Civil War in coastal North Carolina and the heroine is a daughter of a Lumbee Indian woman and a Scotsman. She is intelligent, hard working, committed to her family and her place in the world. She is in love with a fellow Indian man who is becoming the leader of the local resistance to both the Union and the Confederacy in a community which they call Scuffletown. Scuffletown is one of the great names ever created for a place where poverty is king, starvation common, discrimination a daily reality, and the development of what we victims of discrimination like to call "backbone" is the one essential quality which will keep you alive. In those ways,Scuffletown is a sister to every impoverished coal camp in Appalachia, every row of slave cabins on every plantation in the Deep South, and every ghetto in a northern metropolitan area. The people of Scuffletown know how to survive, how to adhere to each other in tough times which are guaranteed to get tougher, and how never to mistake collusion with an enemy as cooperation. Most of the people in Scuffletown live in one room cabins scattered throughout a pine woods swampy world where turpentine making from pine trees is the one way to make a living in a better way than just being a hunter gatherer or scavenger or robber. Scuffletown is located not far from Hell but always has a bit of Heaven in it. It is a place where Love of Place, loyalty to your peers, and generosity no matter how poor you are is a fact of life.

Rhoda, the heroine, falls in love with Henry Lowrie, a young man her own age who grows up to lead the local resistance to both the Union and Confederate forces neither of which has any respect for the locals. As the war degenerates toward Lee's surrender, times just keep getting harder and Henry and Rhoda's two brothers become key members of the resistance with Henry assuming the top position. They are opposed by a local sheriff, his top deputy, and a group of their henchmen who will stop at nothing to maintain control of the populace and pillage as much as they can. The resistance fighters leave home to live in the swamps and strike whenever and wherever they can in order to feed both themselves and those who are dependent upon them. The novel is regularly improved by an event of such striking oppression, suppression, and sometimes resistance to the other elements just mentioned that the reader is spellbound. It is realistic and true of nearly every war of oppression ever waged in the world. In the end, Henry is branded as an outlaw and a reward of $20,000 is placed on his head with the production of himself or his dead body as necessary to collect the money. The war ends before the novel but it does not improve conditions in Scuffletown. Bad goes to worse! One of Henry's loyal men is hanged and Rhoda takes her children to proceedings where she stands in front of the gallows with the condemned man's mother as he falls to his death. But that is not the end of the story. I have never seen a novel I am more happy to recommend. It is a beautiful and often chilling piece of work. This author, Josephine Humphreys is a tremendous writer. I realize full well that one novel is not sufficient platform on which to build monuments to a writer, but this novel is a fine start of the foundation. If her other work is as strikingly wonderful as this novel, she deserves to have her name mentioned in the same breath as Flannery O'Connor, Hemingway, Pearl Buck, and Steinbeck.

"Pink Flamingoed" Book 1 Aylesford Place Series by Steve Demaree

Steve Demaree is a writer in Lexington, Kentucky, who has self-published a pile of books, generally on Amazon as far as I know althought I believe he does sell his books on other websites. I believe he has somewhere between 30 and 40 self-published books on his personal page on Amazon. He tends to write books in series with common charcters and common locationis. This particular book, "Pink Flamingoed", is book 2 in a series called "The Aylesford Place Series". I found an autographed copy of book number 2 in that series on a used bookshelf which belongs to the University of Kentucky Hospital Auxillary at the hospital. I bought that book, autographed, for 75 cents. When I got it home and my wife found that it was book 2 in a series, she insisted that I buy book 1, this book, before we read book 2. My copy of book 2 had an address and phone number listed for Steve Demaree so I called the number hoping that I could buy an autographed copy from him since I like to collect autographed books. He answered the phone himself and we had a nice ten minute or so talk about his writing and our common memories of the area in Lexington where we had both lived and, in particular, of Aylesford Place, a little one block residential street near the UK campus. The book series is a use of the street name and the actual book has little to do with actual Aylesford Place as I have known it for the last 50 years or so. But any author is required to invent or appropriate a lot of names especially if they write a lot of books as Steve Demaree does. This book is not quite 350 pages and has a group of characters who, for the most part, live on the fictional Aylesford Place. Their relationships among themselves are much like a large extended family. They all attend the little church on the street, visit each other's homes, and know an awful lot about each other's lives, likes, dislikes, and unsettling habits. They can all be said to be protagonists of a sort to one degree or another. The book does not contain a genuine villian or antihero. Steve Demaree can write in a style to satisfy the heart of most high school English teachers. The book moves on from one very minor crisis to another in the lives of one or more of the primary characters. It lacks real conflict of any consequence and, therefore, lacks any significant conflict resolution. It is readable and every fifty or so pages Steve Demaree will construct a sentence of some consequence or a humorous line which can make you actually giggle. But the book would be far better if it contained a decent and decidedly effective villian. There are no train wrecks, violent deaths, nasty divorces, or crimes of stature to keep one awake at night. The characters live happy, fulfilled lives and no ever seems to break a leg or a more. But I was pleased to see that Steve Demaree did insert a female,wheelchair bound character into the book who is generally realistic and worthy of respect. As a man who has been married to woman who has been in a wheelchair for more than 25 years, that was important to me. That female character, Allison, is the friend of the primary female character, Amy, who is in love with the primary male character, Brad Forester, who is a successful author of mystery novels who has decided to move to Aylesford Place after inheriting his grandparents home on the street. They meet in the first few pages, are still together and apparently in love at the end of book, but conveniently for other characters who enjoy being a part of their lives they are not married at the end. But there is hope for that marriage in book 2. There is also hope in book 2 for the marriage of Allison and her new school teacher boyfriend Chuck. But nothing really dramatic, tense, or dangerous happens in the book. It was a relief to make it to the end.

"This Proud Heart" by Pearl Buck

On several occasions on this blog, I have written about the works of Pearl S. Buck, one of the small handul of American writers to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature and one of my favorite writers of all time. I have writte3n about "The Good Earth", her most famous novel, which I believe is also one of a very small group of the best novels in all of literature. She followed "The Good Earth" with two other novels in the "Good Earth" trilogy, They are "Sons" and "A House Divided". While either of those novels could have been a career best for many writers, they are not among Buck's best works. I read everything I come across by Buck and still have numerous of her books to be read. Fortunately, a year or so ago, I bought a large collection of books, actually 5 commercial peach boxes full, from the estate of a local school principal. This one we are discussing today I found in a small group of books I bought at a small "junk store" in Rowan county Kentucky which also included a unique first edition of Jack Kerouac's first novel, "The Town And The City", which was published under his legal name John Kerouac, the only one of his books to have been published that way. "This Proud Heart" is one of Buck's lesser known novels which is set in the United States with purely American characters for the most part. The protagnonist is a brilliant woman, Susan Gaylord, and begins when she is a high school student who has shown a great deal of talent in more than one area. She is the daughter of a professor father and a dedicated housewife mother, has one sister, Mary, several years younger and not really close to her older sister. Her father is a somewhat frustrated poet in addition to being a professor in a small college. He has chosen to devote his life to his familiy and his primary profession but does manage to write poetry and publish some of it in small magazines. Susan comes to understand her father's frustration with his life decision and vows to do more to control her own life and its outcomes. She is a talented artist and piano player as the book begins but chooses to marry her high school sweetheart, Mark, who is a totally devoted husband to her and works in the real estate business after they marry. But Susan finds herself interested in sculpture and uses a barn on the old farm they buy to create a piece in wood which is composed of a family of four, a husband, wife, and two children, a son and daughter. That piece is submitted to a contest for a piece to be placed in the lobby of a hospital financed by a very rich man in New York. The piece and her work in general is supported by a famous male sculptor, David Barnes, who has a house in the small New England town in which Susan and her family live. Barnes is a brusque, short spoken man who has strong opinions about Susan's talent and her inablility, as he sees it, to succeed as a sculptor in the United States. He strongly encourages her to come with him to Paris to study under another great sculptor and a man who teaches anatomy to sculptors. She refuses until the untimely death of her husband Mark due to typhoid fever. After his death, she packs up her children and their maid to travel to Paris to actually do what Barnes has suggested. During her time there, she meets another man, Blake Kincaid, who is also a sculptor of much less talent than Susan. They fall in love and she marries Blake which proves to be a less than perfect decision. They return to New York where he lives in considerable wealth and she grows more and more hampered by his efforts to control her, minimize her talent, and disparage her work as a sculptor. She comes to realize these things about Blake and rents a studio in the poor neighborhood near his ostentatious home where she meets and sculpts marble statues of some of the people in the neighborhood. David Barnes returns to the novel from Paris and assists Susan in getting her works into a gallery for an exhibition which confirms her talent and leaves her with a full understanding that she cannot succeed as a sculptor if she remains with Blake. She moves her family back to her hometown after the death of her father and decides to end her relationship with Blake. The novel leaves the whole situation somewhat in midair at the ending but we see that Susan has been able to understand that she must be independent in order to do her best work. The novel is also widely discussed as one of Buck's better works in support of feminism. Susan Gaylord is a strong, successful, competent, talented, and highly motivated woman. For the time in 1938 when the novel was published, she is an amazingly modern woman. I suspect that this novel is somewhat biographical with the sculpting being a substitute for Pearl Buck's writing and Blake being a character based on Buck's missionary first husband whom she divorced to marry her editor and publisher after her early work caused such a stir in the literary world. While I would not say this is one of Buck's best novels such as "The Good Earth", "Imperial Woman", or "The Living Reed", it is a fine novel and well worth reading.

"A Place To Come To" by Robert Penn Warren--Book Review

 

When this novel was first released a reviewer in "The Harvard Crimson" had this to say about it: 

"In his latest novel, Robert Penn Warren combines a Southern preoccupation with the past with a typically modern concern with selfhood and alienation. His protagonist literally revels in his aloneness, his rootlessness, his inability to love. Nor is he content with a mere demonstration of his problems; instead, he explains them to us, over and over again, in a style that mixes the lofty literary references of academic--Jed is a medievalist at the University of Chicago--with Faulknerian neologisms and strings of appositives."  (Julia Klein, "Harvard Crimson", April 23, 1977)

In the end, Ms. Klein did not write a positive review of Robert Penn Warren's novel and I firmly believe she erred by doing so.  While this novel is not another "All The King's Men", Warren's best novel, it is a markedly good novel by a great writer and deserves to be read and appreciated just as much as anything else Warren ever wrote.  But, I suppose when you have won three Pulitzer Prizes, one for "All The King's Men" and two for a pair of his books of poetry, you are expected to write stupendously great literature even if your intent was only to produce a grocery list.   It seems to me that simply because Robert Penn Warren was never invited to join the group of American winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature some critics and general readers think he can be forgotten, left by the wayside of mass marketed literature, and ignored.  The list of American Nobel winners which includes Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph Brodsky, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Pearl S. Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and now even Bob Dylan, is a prodigious list and I do not mean to belittle or question the credentials of Bob Dylan by adding him to list as the last person.  But I do believe that Robert Penn Warren was just as deserving of a Nobel Prize as any American writer who was ever awarded one and a bit more than a few on that list. When I make a list of the greatest American writers, the names I put on that list are Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Buck, Warren, and Flannery O'Connor who also never lived long enough to accumulate a body of literature sufficient to earn the Nobel.  I also find it interesting that three of those writers are southern writers, Warren, Faulkner, and O'Connor.  

And that last statement brings me to one of the most important misconceptions about Robert Penn Warren.  He is sometimes thought of as an Appalachian writer and he definitely was not.  He was indisputably a Southern writer.  He was a self-avowed member of The Fugitives at Vanderbilt and lived much of his life, especially his academic life, at Vanderbilt University and Louisiana State University neither of which is Appalachian.  And his retirement was spent in New England.  Yes, Robert Penn Warren was born in Kentucky, Western Kentucky, which is not in Appalachia, not even in the ever expanding political definition of Appalachia used by the Appalachian Regional Commission and the congress which is a purely political definition based totally in pork barrel politics and not remotely culturally based.  Warren was born and raised in Todd County Kentucky on the Tennessee border in Western Kentucky far outside both the political and cultural boundaries of Appalachia.  He never referred to himself as Appalachian and rightly so.  He never wrote Appalachian Literature.  He wrote Southern Literature and wrote it just as well as Faulkner and O'Connor, even better at times.  

Now that I  have made one more diligent attempt to murder the myth of Robert Penn Warren as an Appalachian writer, let's talk about this book which is a damn fine novel about a southern college professor, raised in Alabama,  living in Nashville and teaching at a college which we can assume is based loosely on Vanderbilt. The writer and professor moves to Chicago to pursue a doctorate, has an affair with a young Jewish woman there, then marries a young woman from the Dakotas who eventualy dies of cancer.  He returns her to her homeland to be buried near her relatives and after her death returns to Tennessee to teach.  The novel is filled with very unique, very human, very well written characters who move in and out of the protagonists life which is often centered around a group of friends which his wealthy lover and her husband have collected on their southern farm.  The protagonist is drifting loosely along in life, attempting to abandon and deny his youth in the deep south and at times filled with ennui.  The death of his wife and her burial in the Dakotas where she grew up is part of the source of that rootlessness but the character is much deeper than one source of ennui.  He is drifting through a group of friends and acquaintances who ride fancy horses, attend fancy parties with their fancy friends, and also seem to drift from moment to moment without aim or purpose.  

But this is a fine novel filled with excellent character development, precise plotting, and tension which must always seek resolution.  It is, admittedly, not "All The King's Men" and it was never intended to be. Warren intended this novel to be "A Place To Come To" and it is.  He intended this protagonist to be Jed Tewksbury whose father died drunk falling from a wagon box while attempting to urinate on the hindquarters of a mule only to be found graveyard dead on a dirt road in Alabama with his penis out of his pants.  That graphic image haunts Jed Tewksbury throughout the novel and a great deal of his ennui can be said to be rooted both in his childhood poverty and his father's ignominious death and drunken lifestyle along with his mother's eventual love for and marriage to a stepfather whom Jed Tewksbury does not really  like and, yet, Jed finds in the end that his little hometown in Alabama is "A Place To Come To".  The novel is filled with the characteristic, powerful writing of Robert Penn Warren.  He moves through the novel like a world champion boxer scattering a combination of literary left hooks, body blows, and precise three and four words jabs into the mind of the astute reader.   If you love good to great literature, southern literature, you need to read this book, and remember as you read it that it was never intended to be "All The King's Men". 

"The Townsman" by Pearl S. Buck--Book Review

Pearl S. Buck wrote and published five novels under the psudonym "John Sedges" during her lifetime after she had returned to America from China.  At the time, her publishers thought that she was being viewed primarily as a Chinese or Asian centered 

writer and that the reading public would be reluctant to buy American centered books by Buck. "The Townsman", "The Long Love" and "Voices In The House" were all published in 1944 and were well received despite the wartime environment which was naturally depressing book sales nationwide. The sales of those two novels under the pseudonym eventually led to the publication of "The Long Love (1944)", "Bright Possession (1952)", and "The Angry Wife (1947)" under the John Sedges pseudonym.  But as Buck is quoted in the foreword  to "American Triptych" a collection of three of the John Sedges novels, eventually someone who knows will talk in such situations and the pseudonym was common public knowledge and no longer used.  

In an earlier blog post, I wrote about a single quotation from "The Townsman" about the American presidency which is suffering from its worst crisis today because of the current Russian Owned occupant of the White House and his inherent incompetence and willingness to destroy the country he betrayed in cooperation with Vladimir Putin and Russia.  You can bet that a book which is good enough to merit a full article

about a single quotation it contains is well worth reading.  "The Townsman" is one novel in "American Triptych: Three John Sedges Novels" and that is the best way to buy it since I do not know of a recent publication of the book.  But it can be found on the customary used book sites such as Alibris and others. Buying it in that format will allow you to enjoy three Pearl S. Buck books for the price of one.  I have to admit I have not yet read the other four John Sedges novels but I fully intend to based on my highly favorable impression of "The Townsman".  This is a long novel of more than four hundred pages but it is well worth the time to read.  The protagonist is Jonathan Goodliffe who, at the beginning of the book, is a teenaged English boy in a large poor family with a hardworking, overburdened mother and a somewhat shiftless father who has big dreams but never fulfills them.  Eventually, the father, Clyde Goodliffe, decides to emigrate to America and the family takes up residence in a brand new, tiny hamlet in the plains of Kansas.  Clyde Goodliffe accomplishes just as little in Kansas as he had in England and as he matures Jonathan becomes the head of the family by default since Clyde leaves all except his favorite son to traipse across Kansas to homestead land.  

As the novel progresses, Jonathan meets and falls in love with the daughter of an itinerant preacher who jilts him to run away with his best friend.  This is a novel of unrequited love; good, solid working class people; and fulfillment of personal commitments by numerous characters including Katie, the woman Jonathan eventually marries and spend his life with.  Jonathan becomes the central figure in the little Kansas town which he nurtures, grows, and keeps in accordance with his beliefs about right and wrong.  The novel serves to espouse many of Pearl S. Buck's own personal beliefs as in the aforementioned quotation about the American presidency, her personal opinions about the equality of the races, and right and wrong.  A set of important figures in the book are a family of former slaves, the Parry's, who have a brilliant eldest son whom Jonathan assists in achieving his dreams.  The Parry parents also play diminished but important roles in the life of the town as a carpenter and a midwife, herb doctor.  

The book is well worth reading as is everything I have ever read by Pearl S. Buck.  I would repeat that it is best bought in the "American  Triptych.." form since you can also enjoy two other John Sedges novels in that format.  Enjoy the book!  It will keep you busy at home for a while as we fight to win against the Corona Virus. 

Reflections On Reading "For Whom The Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway

 I have not read nearly enough of the works of Ernest Hemingway over the years and I have made an attempt lately to correct that mistake.  I began by rereading "The Nick Adams Stories" recently and wrote about it on this blog.  I had read those stories years ago and I had also read some of Hemingway's other classic stories which have been included in anthologies through the years.  But I had sadly neglected reading his novels which were the primary motivators for his having been awarded both the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize.  I have never heard a single serious student of great literature ever rationally belittle the fiction of Ernest Hemingway.  I do not believe that I ever shall.  Both those awards were granted to "The Old Man And The Sea", but I  have never heard any serious student of great literature disparage any of his other novels as having been any less worthy of the awards.  He was a phenomenal writer and is generally mentioned on that short list of America's greatest writers.  My version of that short list would include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Mark Twain and Pearl S. Buck.  While some of you might argue mildly against the inclusion of any of those people on such a list, most would not.  I do not intend to turn this blog post into a discussion of any writer, prize winner, or unawarded nominee.  But I do want to say that I have long wished it was possible to read the entire body of work of every winner of both the Nobel and the Pulitzer.  Each of them is deserving of that attention and study from any serious aficionado of great literature.  I do not expect to be able to complete that list in one lifetime but I am trying.  

Ernest Hemingway--Photo by Getty Images

To get to the point of this blog post, "For Whom The Bell Tolls" is generally an undisputed masterpiece and fully deserves that descriptor.  I have always known that it is a great novel.  I simply had never gotten around to reading it and I am sorry that I waited so long.  In my blog post about "The Nick Adams Stories", I stated that  "Nick Adams loved to fish, hunt, drink, and have sex and those are three of the areas of life in which Ernest Hemingway wrote at a level which few writers ever achieve."  There is little writing about fishing or hunting in "For Whom The Bell Tolls".  This is a novel about an American volunteer in the Spanish Civil War and the great majority of the writing is about war.  But there is also quite a bit of sexual writing which plays a key role in the character development in the novel and the relationship between the protagonist Robert Jordan and his Spanish girlfriend Maria.  That relationship only lasts about three days and yet, in many ways, it is the most important relationship in the lives of both characters.  There is also some discussion in the novel of hunting, but primarily the hunting of men in a war.  Fishing is only referred to in passing near the conclusion of the novel when the protagonist notices a trout rising to the surface of a stream over which he is preparing to dynamite a key bridge.  But those sections of the novel reinforce my opinion that the area of life in which Ernest Hemingway did his best writing are war, sex, hunting, and fishing.  

In this novel, Hemingway also addresses the issue of suicide even more directly and at more length than he did in "The Nick Adams Stories".  But very near the end of the novel, he has the protagonist Robert Jordan refuse to allow a compatriot to shoot him as he is too severely wounded to flee with his band of Spanish revolutionaries.  That is quite interesting in light of the fact that the author eventually chose to end his life via suicide by gunfire.  But his best writing in more than one book often addresses the issue of suicide, both the possibility of the suicide of a protagonist and historical suicide by one or more characters who were major players in the lives of those protagonists. It is generally conceded that when Hemingway discusses suicide in his novels he is reflecting both on his father's suicide and his own ever present consideration of the act to end his own life.  I must admit that I have never read a scholarly article about the issue of suicide in the writing of Ernest Hemingway but many professional and scholarly writers have attempted to analyze his literary ruminations on the issue as well as suicide as a familial issue in the Hemingway clan.  You can rest assured that enough has been written about Ernest Hemingway and suicide to fill more than a few books.  You can also rest assured that any book which begins with the quotation from John Donne: "Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." will also discuss death.  This is a novel about war and nearly all war novels are replete with death.  But this novel is about much more than death despite the fact that most of the members of the guerilla band of Robert Jordan are dead before the novel ends.

I would argue that this novel is a love story, perhaps two love stories, or even three.  There is the primary love story between Robert Jordan and Maria, who was a victim of war before the two even met.  There is also the love story between the other couple in the novel, the alcoholic guerrilla leader Pablo and his wife and co-leader, the loud, brash, dangerous, and somewhat masculine Pilar.  There is also the love story between all these Spanish partisans in Jordans guerrilla group and their homeland for which they have literally bet their lives.  This is a novel which no serious student of literature should ever neglect to read.  It is a masterpiece. 

Reading And Defending "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn"

I have written more than once on this blog about reading banned books, both those previously banned and those currently banned or being threatened with banning.  Many of the greatest books in the world have been or are still banned in many countries and smaller jurisdictions ranging from nations down to tiny school districts.  Both of Mark Twain's incredibly well written and well loved novels about growing up as a boy on the Mississippi River have been banned at times and many school districts in America today still refuse to allow them to be taught in their public schools.  There is no more important organ of democracy in the world than a free and unfettered press which is why the Founding Fathers in their infinite wisdom guaranteed it in the US Constitution.  The very reasons they guaranteed it are the same reasons that are being used today to attack that constitutionally guaranteed free press.  Despots, tyrants, zealots, and idiots are likely to attempt to ban books for as long as they are printed and to move on, as they are today, to also attacking and banning all other forms of mass communication.  Nothing scares tyrants, despots, zealots, and idiots more than the truth and the free expression of it.  I have stated at times in writings on this blog that it is likely that one of these two books in discussion in this blog post was probably the first book I ever read which had been banned.  So with the need to preserve a free press in mind, I have recently reread both of these masterpieces from Mark Twain.  

I fully realize that there are many reasons these two books were banned and that many of those reasons are legitimate on their face.  Much of the content in the books which refers to African Americans can be considered to be racist.  But when we read any book, we should examine the date of the original copyright and attempt to determine if the book in question was an accurate portrayal of the people, places, and times which they are depicting at the time of their original publication.  There can be absolutely no doubt that Mark Twain understood the Mississippi River, Missouri, and the people who resided there in the late 1800's as well or better than any other human alive at that point.  He also understood the institution of slavery and he did not endorse it as any intelligent reader of the two books can tell you.  These books were much more stories about friendships between unique and very different individuals who were living at the margins of Missouri society in the later years of the 19th century.  Two white boys, one the heavily abused son of the town drunk, and the other raised by an aunt after being orphaned befriend and have that friendship returned by an African American slave.  Throughout the books, at no time do these three persons ever treat each other as less than equal.  They never fail to reciprocate with the same loyalty and trust which is offered to them.  They take turn about standing up for, fighting in support of, and rescuing each other from one peril after another ranging from murderers, con men, and fugitive slave hunters, to a highly dangerous and deadly Big Muddy.  Along the 800 or so pages contained in the two books, each of the three faces opportunities to take the easy road out without being forced to suffer and they all always stand up, grit their teeth, and take the road less traveled in support of their friends.  At various times in the manuscripts, each of them is hailed as a hero when the easier route would have been for them to accept their own personal villiany and walk quietly away without losing any skin off their nose.  They never do that.  They stick by each other from start to finish and never flinch.  

Mark Twain--Photo by Ebay

Yes, I know that the language in the books, especially that in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is racist.  But it was the common language of the day among all the groups whose dialects Twain was writing.  Mark Twain wrote in the original foreword to "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" that he would be writing the book using three dialects of three different groups of people in the area of his fictional town on the river.  Here is what he said: "the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary Pike County dialect; and four modified varieties of this last."  And that is exactly what he did.  I am not always a fan of writing in dialect and that aversion is deeply rooted in the fact that I grew up speaking and still speak my own version of one of the most maligned and vilified dialects in the country, the Southern Appalachian dialect.  When Mark Twain wrote in those various dialects of Missouri, he was required to use their verbiage, vocabulary, accents, and idiosyncrasies.  And he did a damn fine job of it.  He has ever since been pilloried by his detractors for having used the singular, and sometimes singularly repulsive, vocabulary of Missouri slave holders and poor whites.  And if we, in our self-appointed "wisdom" (translate ignorance) attempt to edit those words out of the books, we are doing a great disservice to the average reader who had no idea how poor slaves were spoken of and treated at the time of the books.  

I have little doubt that some of my readers here will accuse me of racism for having taken this position in defense of two of the greatest American novels ever written.  So let me tell you a little about my life history.  I have spent twenty years living and working in settings, both in agriculture and the human services, in which the employees and clientele were roughly 80% African American.  I have performed home visits in the ghettos of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Erie, Southern New Jersey, and Lexington, Kentucky.  I know whereof I speak when I speak of the downtrodden since 8 of those years were spent working with a homeless population who were primarily African American.  But if you choose be well rounded in the area of American Literature or to produce children who are well rounded, you need to read and you need to assure that those children read the work of Mark Twain, and if possible, to read all of his works.  Do not in your self-appointed righteousness refuse to read two of the best American novels ever written. 

"Under The Juniper Tree" by Emily Steiner--Book Review

Steiner, Emily. Under The Juniper Tree (Haines Printing, Northeast, PA, 2019)

My friend Emily Steiner has just completed and released her fourth novel and the third in her "Lilly Of Appalachia" series about a coal mining family in Harlan County Kentucky.  I have previously reviewed the first two books in the series and apparently played a productive role in the second, "Under Fire", for which Emily provided me the head swelling mention on the acknowledgements page of this book as having been "..a bottomless well of research material".  I must admit that I am flattered since I respect and like Emily a great deal.  All three of the books are directly available from Emily at her home address of Emily Steiner, 155 Memorial Gardens Road, West Liberty, KY 41472.  You can actually call Emily at 606-495-8090 and she will actually answer her own telephone and talk to you immediately or return your calls if she is busy.  The full set of books are available or each may be ordered individually.  This is what Emily says about pricing: "I charge 10.99 plus 2.75 for shipping for a single copy of the new book. (If it’s to someone in KY, there’s also sales tax.) The others are still 9.95, and will be until I reprint them in a few months. Then they’ll all be 10.99. I know this is sort of confusing... If you want to tell your people, I also offer a special in the whole set—28.00 plus shipping."  Since this is a self-published series of books, please allow me to say this about Emily and her professionalism.  Emily is the daughter of the manager of the editorial department at Rod and Staff Publishers, Crockett, KY, one of the two largest Mennonite publishing companies in the country, and she takes her writing and all aspects of publishing seriously.  Rod and Staff are not the publishers or printers of this book although they did publish another of her books which is more directly about life in a Mennonite family.  This book was printed by Haines Printing in Northeast, PA, a small Mennonite owned printer, and I have never seen more professional work from a small printer or publisher.  Based on having seen Emily's three novels, all of which were printed by Haines, I am willing to recommend them without reservations.  They do high quality, fully professional, crisp, tight, slick books which are comparable to the work being done by any publisher in America.  

But let's talk about this novel particularly.  It is the third, and Emily says the final, novel in the series about a poor Appalachian coal mining family from Harlan County Kentucky although most of this novel is set in a fictitious West Virginia called Three Springs.  The protagonist, Lilly Sherman and her husband, coal miner and strongly non-violent preacher Everette Sherman have left Harlan County because Everette's non-violence and refusal to participate in union activity have made him a target of violence during a strike which is detailed in the second novel, "Under Fire".  For those of you who, like me, strongly support trade unionism, let me say that Emily's discussions of and beliefs about trade unionism are strongly based in her Mennonite religion.  It is genuine, a basic part of core beliefs about life, morals, and religion and I respect her for it.  She and I disagree about this aspect of our lives but we disagree amicably and respectfully.  I value her friendship and respect a great deal and I believe that feeling is mutual.  Despite that difference of opinion, this is a book and a series of books that is worth reading for the Appalachian reader or the reader in coal country.  

Emily Steiner--Photo by the Steiner Family

This novel does not directly address the union movement at length and unionism and strikes are not a major part of this book.  Coal mining and life in a coal camp is a major part of the plot of this book.  The key characters of the novel are members of two extended families who live in the two sides of a typical coal camp duplex.  They are realistically drawn, believable, living and breathing humans who are working together to make the most of terrible lifestyle.  Coal camp life is realistically portrayed and I can assure you that Emily has done her research for all three books.  This book is filled with unemployment, coal mine disasters, and untimely death.  My most serious concern about the plot and the eventual resolution of the conflict in the book lies in the fact that the ending is, in my opinion, somewhat unrealistic.  But I am still pleased with the book as I have always been with the work of the author.  Her work is more mature from the first book to this one.  She is growing into the strong, young, female novelist I knew she would become based on the first book.  She is well worth reading and appreciating.  Use the contact information above and order at least one of these books.  Do yourself a real favor and order all three.  You can have the set for just a little more than the price of a hardback bestseller from a major publisher.  You will enjoy this book and it will give you a better understanding of coal camp life shortly after the turn of the twentieth century.  

"Reading Lolita In Tehran" by Azar Nafisi--Book Review

I have just completed reading the book "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi and I have never been more pleased with a book in  my life.  This memoir is a masterpiece which explains why it was on the New York Times Bestseller List for more than 100 weeks after its release in 2003.  I never read a book because it is or was a best seller.  I read books because I want to and when I want to.  I am very glad I never read this book when it was a best seller.  Today is the time when every American should be reading this wonderful book.  It is a memoir about life in Tehran in the years immediately after the Iranian Revolution and written by Azar Nafisi, a college professor at two major Iranian universities before she was forced to leave the country and now teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.  The title comes from a secret reading group or class which Dr. Nafisi set up in her home with a small group of her hand selected female students after she was expelled from her teaching position in Tehran.  She set up the group in order to continue teaching books which had been or were about to be banned in Iran and to continue contact with this small group of her best, most dedicated, and most liberal female students.  The book does an incredible job of documenting the increasing oppression of the revolutionary government against women, intellectuals, Americans, and non-Muslims.  Simultaneously, for the student of great literature, the book can serve as the reading list for a seminar on the development of the novel and of literature about women, especially about women in oppressive environments.   But it can and should also serve as a warning to every citizen of America about what is happening in Washington, DC, and in the soul of the United States of America as we suffer through this terrible time with the illegal occupation of the White House by an agent of Vladimir Putin and Russia; the steadily increasing oppression in America against immigrants, women, and liberals; the increasing unconstitutional pressure being brought to bear on our government by Right Wing Radical religious forces; and the wide ranging attacks on American Democracy by all these forces and the outside forces in Russia which control many of them.  

I have said for many years that in order for the Religious Right Wing Radicals in America to believe the things they say about religion and politics that they have had to go through all the identical psychological changes that the fundamentalist mullahs in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan went through.  Their supporters become incensed at this statement and spout stock phrases about how they are different from Muslims and they are "God's chosen people" which is exactly what the mullahs told Iranians, Iraqis, and Afghans.  First, in order for either group to believe the things they claim they do, they have to believe they have a direct line to God, that they understand God better than anyone else alive,  and that God is telling them what to do.  Secondly, they have to believe that God is also telling them to tell the rest of us what to do.  They all, both mullahs and "Christians", have to believe they are God's appointed emissaries on earth.  Personally, I believe that if God intended to take a long vacation and leave anyone else in charge of our hearts, minds, and souls, He/She/It would have told the rest of us in advance who was in charge.  The bottom line is that in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the mullahs are fake imams, fake mullahs, and fake Muslims; and in the United States of America, these self-described "Christians" are fake preachers, fake leaders, and fake Christians.  In fact, they are Hypochristians and guilty of everything that compound word describes.  

Now, let's get back to "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and how this all ties in with what is happening in America. This book does an incredible job of explaining on a personal level what happened as the radical Muslims in Iran gradually, step by step took over the lives of every citizen of Iran.  It is also an incredible signpost about what the Hypochristians, Right Wing Radical Repugnicans, and agents of Russia are doing in America.  The parallels are stunning and this book should serve as a warning toward anyone who is not already fighting tooth and nail to put an end to the Right Wing Radical Russian Owned Criminal Syndicate which is illegally occupying the White House after committing TREASON with Russia in order to steal an American election.  It describes step by step how more and more oppressive changes were foisted on the people of Iran in the name of God.  In America, the steps being taken are very similar.  We are now seeing children dying in chain link cages on American soil and being killed in the name of America.  We are seeing incredibly oppressive laws being passed to control, abuse, and nullify women, liberals, Democrats, and anyone else who opposes the criminals who support the TREASON.  There is no difference between the illegal occupiers of the White House and the Iranian mullahs in all their black, shriveled, little souls.  

This book also has a wonderfully insightful discussion of most of the works Azar Nafisi and her group of Iranian women, some of who spent years in prison during the time period of the book, read during their life as a class or book group.  Dr. Nafisi's understanding of literature is tremendous and she provides a lengthy reading list at the end of the book.  But there is also a much more lengthy reading list scattered throughout the pages of this book with the mention of dozens of other important and educational works of literature which Nafisi used to educate the women in her class.  Each of us would be well served to devote ourselves to reading and understanding every book mentioned in this incredible memoir.  We would all be far better people and citizens of the world if we did so.  We would reach the end of that long literary quest with a far better understanding of both politics and literature, both Iran and America, both Democracy and the enemies who wish to destroy it. 

"While Earth Still Speaks" by Nancy Werking Polling--Book Review

Poling, Nancy Werking, Illustrated by Jerald Pope, While Earth Still Speaks (Black Mountain, NC. Screech Owl Press In Conjunction With Old Mountain Press, 2019)

Nancy Werking Poling is a writer who lives in Western North Carolina but has spent most of her life in other areas of the country.  This is not and is not billed as an Appalachian novel.  It is more accurately described as an environmental novel and is the author's second novel and fifth book overall.  It comes from two presses in Western North Carolina, one of which is a small vanity press,  possibly an imprint of the author, and the other a small press which actually did the printing.  The work on the book printing and binding is an aspect which I watch closely when I read such essentially self published books.  Many, if not most, of these presses are simply in it for the money and unless the author is very diligent and oversees every aspect of the process from start to finish they often produce shoddy work which simply does not appear professional to the trained eye.  This book has a few errors in the review copy which I received but they are minimal and the work is  acceptable overall .

Now, let's talk about the book itself.  The protagonist is a woman of middle to late middle age who has spent her life in a very conservative and restrictive religious sect which devalues and restricts women to something not quite a beast of burden but far less than an equal to their male counterparts.  She is the mother of two essentially grown children, a son and a daughter.  The book is broken into segments which include the family life on the farm, the protagonist's eventful month or so with her daughter in a revolutionary environmental group which kidnaps the head of the North Carolina environmental agency, and interspersed visions which come to the woman from Mary Surrat and the Virgin Mary and can be loosely connected to the main story line. For those  of you who have never heard of Mary Surrat, she was a boarding house operator who was arrested, convicted, and hanged for taking part in the Booth plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.  She was the first woman executed in the United States. Mary Surrat is seen, by the author, as an example of the fact that dying for a cause is not always virtuous.  The author states in her acknowledgements section that several people who had read the manuscript had suggested that she remove Mary Surrat from the book.  I agree with those people. But there are hundreds of stories of highly successful authors who resisted strong opposition to their first drafts from editors, family, friends, and the unsuspecting strangers upon whom they foisted their unpublished work in public places. However, in my life, I have known quite a few well known and successful writers who often doubled as mentors, professors, and friends.  I like to believe that I learned at least one or two things from every one of them.  One of the most important things I ever learned was voiced by many of them. That truth is the overly simplistic admonition to write about what you know best.  I also found that truth to be wonderfully expounded upon in the classic motivational book "Acres Of Diamonds" by Russell H. Conwell although his discussion of the subject applied to life and personal achievement instead of writing.  It could be that I have already or will in the future learn something from Nancy Werking Poling.  She has already reinforced a concept for me that many others have expressed in the past: Writers should write every day and avoid the naysayers.  Ms. Poling has published five books and this is her second self-published book while I have only accumulated a couple of dozen publications in three different genres and a book chapter or two while approaching the grave without a published major work while diligently eschewing the vanity presses. But I am not certain that Ms. Polling was writing about what she truly knows in this book.  I do sincerely believe that she is fully and deeply committed to the environmental and the women's rights movements just as is her protagonist.  But I doubt that Ms. Polling has ever joined or even had personal knowledge about a deeply secretive environmental activist group.  I doubt that she ever engaged in a kidnapping to prove a political point as her characters do.  And, in spite of the validity of Stockholm Syndrome and the shining example of Patty Hearst, I doubt that she ever fell in love with a hostage or hostage taker.  I believe her book would have been stronger if she had stuck to the things she knows best in her heart of hearts and written an activist environmentalist book without kidnappers, their victims, or their implausible love affairs. I believe she could do a much better job of writing non-fiction on this subject.  She has actually written one non-fiction book, "Before It Was Legal: A Black-White Marriage (1945-1987)", which I have not read but would like to do so before I make any all encompassing blanket judgments about her skills as a writer.

Speaking of Ms. Poling's skills as a writer, this book is well written but not exceptionally so.  The linguistic skill is above average but the plotting and character development of most of the characters other than the protagonist is thin.  Many of these characters other than the protagonist and her daughter are one dimensional.  They do not live and breath in the highly credible manner which the best writers have developed.  To go beyond what I said earlier about having learned at least one thing from many, if not most, of the writers I have known, I have, for many years, held firmly to two of my own beliefs and theories about good writing.  The first of these ideas espouses a comparison of good to excellent writing as being similar to human DNA.

I have always thought that in the best books I have read in my life  plot is a lot like the double helix spiral structure of human DNA as discovered by Drs. Crick and Watson.  The double helix spiral of DNA is a twisting spiral of two long strands which wrap around each other and twist from one end to the other much like a pair of snakes or two strands of ribbon. Along each of these strands, there are chromosomes and genes for the entire length of the spiral which serve to make up the multi-faceted contents of the DNA structure.  An above average plot also works in much the same way.  In the plot we have parallel plots and subplots which progress for the length of the novel.  Along each of these “strands” of plot and subplot we also have characters, characterizations, key pieces of information, human interactions between characters, individual and group actions, and other elements and portrayals which advance the major plot or subplots throughout the length of a novel.  "While Earth Still Speaks" is not such a well plotted book.  It does not contain that double helix style of writing.  But I will not say that I believe it is the best writing Ms. Poling is capable of producing.  It could well be within her grasp to develop that level of writing.  She has not fully developed what I believe to be her best potential in this book.  


My second idea about good writing is a comparison to good boxing.  Superficially, it seems to be illogical to compare a purely mental vocation such as writing to what many people consider to be a fully physical vocation like boxing.  But good boxing is not purely physical.  It requires a great deal of thought both before entering the ring and definitely inside the ropes against a worthy opponent.  A good to exceptional boxer must think on their feet, constantly assess their opponent and his actions, swiftly adjust to changes in the opponents style, and always counter with both the best defense and offense for fifteen rounds.  A good boxer has an arsenal of several different punches and styles which they use as the circumstances require.  They have jabs, uppercuts, roundhouse blows, body pounding short punches, and every now and then a few kidney punches.  Good writing combines long, complex, well structured sentences.  But it becomes boring if every sentence is ten, twenty, or fifty words long.  Good writing must also have some jabs, short sentences composed of, at most, a subject, object, and verb.  When these combinations are used in writing it is a lot like watching Larry Holmes box during his streak of 48 consecutive wins.  In such novels, there are jabs, roundhouse punches, uppercuts, and a few kidney punches, and the total load of such writing literally knocks the reader out.  "While Earth Still Speaks" does not have that kind of arsenal.  It moves along successfully from the scene in which we meet the protagonist to the scene in which she and her co-conspirators are arrested for their crimes.  But it is not holding you on the edge of your seat.  You are not striving to literally lean on the outside of the ropes to see that knockout blow delivered.  It is functional but not dazzling.  It is readable if you are committed to the environmental or women's rights movements.  But it doesn't leave you asking "OK, what happens to these characters after they were arrested?"  

This is a book which you might want to read.  You might enjoy it.  But you are not likely to return to it every few years to remind yourself of what role Mary Surrat played in the story or to remember just why the protagonist divorced her husband to become an environmental activist.  But it did leave me wishing I could read Ms. Poling's non-fiction book, "Before It Was Legal: A Black White Marriage (1945-1987).  Keep writing and watch a lot of good boxing, Ms. Poling. 

"The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck---Book Review

Buck, Pearl S. The Good Earth (New York, NY, Washington Square Press 1931)  

Pearl S. Buck, Photo By Arnold Genthe

For nearly sixty years, I have been an avid reader and, at times, during that stretch I have read as many as 100 books a year.  My "To Be Read" shelf is always overloaded and I am always behind.  Yet, somehow, after all that reading and frequent writing about my reading, I have still missed out on many books which I want to read, know I should read, and keep pushing to the back of my mind until later.  Two or three still unmet goals on my mental reading list have been to read all the recipients of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes along with the recipients of the Caldecott Medal and the Newberry Medal.  I would also like to read most, if not all, the books written by the various presidents of the US.  While I have read numerous works on all those lists, I am a long way from completing any of them.  As a result, I often find myself finally getting around to reading some classic work that I should have completed decades before.  Lately I have completed two works on that list which I should read many moons ago.  Today, I am writing about "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck which was a major factor in her receipt of both the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize.  Additionally, I specialize in Appalachian Literature and Appalachian writers.  While many people argue that Pearl S. Buck was not an Appalachian writer since she wrote most of her body of work about her life in China there is no disputing that she was a native of West Virginia and Appalachia.  She was also educated at Randolph-Macon Women's College in Lynchburg, Virginia.  Based on birth and education, she deserves as much attention in the greater body of Appalachian writers as anyone else.  

"The Good Earth" is the first work in the Good Earth Trilogy or the House of Earth Trilogy.  The central character and protagonist in the novel is the Chinese farmer Wang Lung who progresses from landed poverty to great wealth during the time frame of the novel.  Wang Lung is Buck's personification of the Chinese farmers she knew during her years with her missionary parents in China from the early 1890's to about 1914 when she was sent home to attend college at Randolph-Macon College.  She returned to China and lived there until about 1934 but was eventually pilloried as an American Imperialist after the Chinese Revolution.  But China was always the central force in her life and her writing.  Wang Lung, due to his poverty, is forced to buy a slave woman, O-lan, from the wealthy House of Hwang to be his wife.  Through their mutual hard work and parsimony, they eventually grow wealthy and after the death of O-lan, Wang Lung is able to buy the House of Hwang following the loss of most of their wealth by the sons of Lord Hwang.  In many ways, "The Good Earth" and the character Wang Lung are an every man character and story. 

 The novel delves into Chinese culture without making that culture a primary element but was disputed often by Chinese scholars as being more of a caricature of Chinese life.  But, speaking as a student primarily of Appalachian Culture and Appalachian Literature, I see elements of both in the novel.  Upon the death of his aged father, Wang Lung chooses a piece of his own land on a hilltop to use as a cemetery for his family and his friend and overseer Ching. Pearl Buck also chose to be buried along with her husband, Richard John Walsh, on the family farm in Bucks County Pennsylvania.  While I have not studied the life of Pearl Buck deeply enough to fully defend this point in my argument, that choice of a burial ground on a hilltop on the family farm in the novel as is a very Appalachian thing to do.  Many of my own relatives including my parents, maternal grandparents, siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles are buried on two such cemeteries in my native Knott County Kentucky and I have written about such cemeteries in this blog.  Additionally, the way in which the protagonist Wang Lung cares for his mentally handicapped daughter, who is only referred to as "my poor fool", is uncharacteristic of the widely publicized way in which both handicapped individuals and female babies are dealt with in China.  This particular character, "my poor fool", is dealt with by her father Wang Lung in much the same way Pearl Buck cared for her only biological child, Caroline Grace Buck, who was mentally handicapped due to the presently treatable genetic condition phenylketonuria.  That type of care, love, and guarantee of personal safety for a handicapped person is much more Appalachian than Chinese.  

As the novel progresses, Wang Lung accumulates wealth and land.   He is tied deeply and permanently to his land and chooses to move back to it before his approaching death taking both his young slave/concubine and his "poor fool" with him to the old Earthen House on the original family farm he inherits from his father.  His three sons and the wives of two of them nurture deep conflicts between them and the last few chapters of the novel are used to set up the remaining two books in the trilogy, "Sons" and "A House Divided".  I sincerely regret waiting so long to read this book and to begin my study of both Pearl S. Buck and her voluminous body of work.  Her place in the greater body of world literature is undisputed and deservedly so.  "The Good Earth" is a classic novel of a man, a family, and the land and in some ways is reminiscent of "East Of Eden" by John Steinbeck.  Its characters are fully developed.  The story is universal in farming communities worldwide.  The themes of family conflict are also universal and deeply human.  This is a great novel and should be required reading for every student or lover of literature. I cannot wait to finish the trilogy.